How To Argue For Abortion Rights

Norma McCorvey (left), with her attorney, Gloria Allred, outside the Supreme Court in April 1989, when the court heard arguments in a case that could have overturned Roe (Credit: Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 2.0)

In 1969, a woman named Norma McCorvey, known by the legal pseudonym “Jane Roe”, became pregnant with her third child. Living in Texas, where abortion was illegal save for instances of medical complications that could kill the mother, McCorvey had her lawyers file a lawsuit in the U.S. federal court against her local DA, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas’s abortion laws were unconstitutional. The rest was history — the Supreme Court…